34

CHAPTER - I

WOMEN AND WRITING

Woman must write herself; must write about women and bring women

to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as

from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the

same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the

world and into history – by her own movement (Helene Cixous 334).

A Challenged Path of Words

As is well known the entire world over, writing has emerged as one of the

essential and effective tools for women’s liberation from underrated status and

enforced silence; to crack and deconstruct the myths surrounding them; to come to

terms with their own selves. Women’s writing, however, seems to continue to be as

threatening to the vested interests of governments, societies and families, as it has

been energizing and fulfilling to women who write. Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen

write,

One of the most moving sessions of the 1986 Oslo International

Feminist Book Fair was ‘ Writing as a Dangerous Profession’, where

women from Spain, Kenya, South Africa, Northern Ireland and

Uruguay spoke poignantly of being imprisoned by authorities, and of

being rejected by their own communities, simply for communicating in

writing with others (10).

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Women’s association with writing has always been imperative because writing

can be a persuasive source of change both individually and socially. Writing, for

women, seems to mean a mode of survival, an emotional and intellectual vent to a

subdued, muffled conscience. This has other consequences too. Writing has the power

to give women control over their own lives. It proffers them possibilities of agency

and autonomy. For, more and more women from the recent past have begun to write

the ‘actual’, ‘real’ and not the ‘ideal’ aspect of their existence. Their writings achieve,

to use Gayle Green’s words, “counter hegemonic interventions” that are socially

effective (7).

Women in India, feminist researches tell us, have been writing for more than

two thousand years. It is a strange phenomenon that despite their passion and

excellence in writing, women writers in the country still feel writing is an “isolated,

solitary activity, often surreptitious, generally unacknowledged and undervalued”

(Joseph et al 4). With their growing power and stakes in India, the British rulers

propagated their belief that Indian literatures lacked “the literary” or “the scientific

information required for the moral and mental cultivation” of the indigenous people to

accept and appreciate good (British) governance. As a result, while the “whole literary

traditions” of the indigenous people were “delegitimized and marginalized”,

individual works of those of the subordinated sections of society, comprising

women’s writing too, were categorically ignored and belittled (Tharu and Lalita 10-1).

Back in Britain as well, feminist ideologies were exploring the questions of

representation and lineage of women in literature rather than discussing women’s

writing, per se.

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Nevertheless, the Victorian British society had already engaged in the

‘Woman Question’, as it was termed, right from the 1830s. The debate on the

‘Woman Question’ was convoluted and multifaceted, challenging the constraints

clamped upon middle-class women’s lives. A demand for greater professional and

educational opportunity was put forth. This argument kindled a new feminist

campaign, late in the century, for women’s rights. What came to be regarded as the

Silver Age witnessed many women writers express a longing for self-fulfillment and

complete acceptance in society. In the 1890s, a phenomenon called ‘New Woman’

fiction had British women writers produce novels, stories and poems that anticipated

promising prospects for women in the century to come. The term itself was coined by

British novelist Sarah Grand in 1894. The ‘New Woman’ came to be considered in

society as liberated and daring, a rebel against the sexual dogma of the 19th century,

an advocate of women’s suffrage and other women’s rights. The ‘New Woman’

indeed sought the curbing of avaricious male sexuality.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Aleksandra Kollontai became known as

a dominant propagandist for radical restructuring of relations between the sexes. As a

result, women attained full civil rights in the new Soviet Union. However, they

remained crippled by conventional outlook, and bore the brunt of the ‘double burden’

of work outside and inside the home. In the meantime, the United States book market

woke up to the palpable surfacing of women’s fiction written and read by women, and

centred on women’s experiences. The Women’s Liberation Movement, which

emerged in Britain and the US in the 1960s, fought for women’s rights. The women

activists demanded for an end to women’s legal and economic subjugation, within and

outside the home.

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Tharu and Lalita argue that the appreciation of women’s writing, accompanied

with the thought of salvaging the traditions of women’s literatures that were thrust

into oblivion from centuries, evolved only from the 1970s and largely due to

American feminist engagements. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, in 1969, drew

attention to the representation of women in ‘canonized’ literature. Waking up to the

stereotypical imaging of women in literary texts created till then, feminist critics were

encouraged to look for alternative images of women in women’s literature. The

canonical texts, they found, portrayed women either in excessively ideal or in utterly

sinister shades turning them into flat characters. Such texts merely displayed the male

delusion and prejudice about woman and her personality. Mary Anne Ferguson’s

acclaimed anthology titled Images of Women in Literature, first published in 1973,

demonstrated how literary texts “commonly cast women in sexually defined roles”, of

“mothers, good submissive wives or bad dominating ones, seductresses, betrayers,

prim single women, or the inspiration for male artistes” (Tharu and Lalita 17), as dim-

wits, as home birds, and as the blissfully uneducated. Such depictions were

‘simplistic’ projections of women and were far from reality and were not without

reasons because, as Tillie Olsen posits in Silences the conditions of production do

bear influence on the quality of the product and hence are inseparable. Women’s

‘real’ worlds and their ‘real’ experiences that are generally undermined as personal,

are the products of familial, social, political, economic, and literary milieu in which

they are framed and formulated. With the colossal weight of innumerable taboos and

influences on them, women’s lives can scarcely be one-dimensional as they are

generally illustrated. The most predominant feminist assertion that ‘the personal is

political’ sensitizes the open-minded reader to reckon with the innumerable

constrictions – of lack of freedom, education, empathy, safety; of domestic

 38

responsibility; of poverty; of censorship—that eclipse women’s expression in writing.

Feminist researches discovered that women writers’ depiction of women has more

often than not, been relatively complex and less stereotypical than that by the male

writers of canonized texts. Besides, studies of literary criticism revealed that, women

writers were invariably stigmatized as family-centric and feminine, and their

experiences denounced as unexciting and inconsequential which failed to raise the

reader to sublimity. In 1968, Mary Ellmann argued in her book Thinking About

Women that “Books by women are treated as though they themselves were women,

and criticism (by male academics and reviewers) embarks, at its happiest, upon an

intellectual measuring of busts and hips” (29).

Ellmann, and a decade later Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s

Writing, argued substantially about the tradition of “phallic criticism” which had

come to be regarded as the ‘mainstream criticism’, where women writers and their

works never figured. Other than some superficial reference here and there, they

demonstrated, women writers, on no account, received the serious discussion they so

rightly deserved. This neglect of and hostility to women writers, feminist critics soon

pointed out, were not only due to the preconception of male writers about women’s

rational abilities, but was also owing to the male superiority which had gained

acceptance among men and women and had become a norm in society. Ferguson

points out the observation by Frank Kermode, that the established literary canon in the

West is considered as sacred as the canon of Biblical books and is carefully guarded

against the possible foray by “outsiders”, the immature and unversed “such as women

and blacks” (Ferguson 15). For a long time, literary texts by women and blacks were

thought to corrupt the standards set by literary critics. Hence, when their writings

were considered at all, it was done with “condescension or scorn as minor and

crude…. The prejudice against women inherent in attitudes (toward literature) was
 39

epitomized as late as 1959 by a male critic of Emily Dickinson who suggested that the

phrase ‘woman poet’ was a contradiction in terms” (Ferguson 15).

Feminist critics saw through the politics of male critics when they counted the

female into the blanket group of human, thus negating and undermining the

‘difference’ of woman’s personality and experience from that of man’s. As students,

teachers, writers, editors or sometimes just as readers, women began to cognize the

limited and secondary roles prearranged to fictional heroines, women writers and

female critics and embarked on asking fundamental questions about their own relation

to literary study and thereby to life itself. Consequently, by the late 1970s, women’s

writing came to be set up as a new discipline of study owing to the emergent feminist

literary histories and necessary critical benchmarks aiding to address the concerns at

stake in the study of women’s writing. When Ellen Moers separated writers on the

basis of gender in her Literary Women: the Great Writers (1976), she initially did so

reluctantly. But she justified her step as an important one to fight the male politics of

“subsuming” women into the category of human and thereby dissolving their

individual personalities and substance in the indistinct and large ‘human’ society.

Moers put up the case for women writers arguing that ‘women’s writing was actually

a rapid and powerful undercurrent distinct from, but hardly subordinate to, the

mainstream.’ Moer’s book, in fact, set the tone for the subsequent discussion on

women’s writing encompassing

the exclusion of women writers (from the ‘mainstream’ literary

establishment), the need to find new strategies to open up canonical

texts for feminist readings, the idea that a knowledge of feminist

history was crucial for an understanding of women’s writing, and the

suggestion that women writers had shared a subculture that they often

secretly kept alive (Tharu and Lalita 20).

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A year later, in 1977, came Elaine Showalter’s in-depth exploration on “the

female literary tradition” in English fiction from around 1840s to the present, in A

Literature of Their Own. She posited that the self-expression of any minority group

came as a response and in relation to a dominant society. She identified three

important stages which she argued, were traceable in all such self-expressive literary

subcultures – a phase of imitation, a phase of protest, and “a phase of ‘self-discovery’,

a turning inward, freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for

identity” (Showalter 13).

In 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar set out to analyze the works of the

major Anglo-American women writers to mark out “a distinctively female literary

tradition”, in The Madwoman in the Attic. They focused on “female literary creativity”

as a “response to male literary assertion and coercion” (Gilbert and Gubar xii).

Patriarchal ideology in the nineteenth century, they argued, compelled upon the

woman writer a double burden – of challenging the myth that creativity was a male

prerogative, and of working beyond the ideal of the “eternal feminine” that was

created as inspiration and accompaniment to the male. The women writers were in a

state of ambivalent fix as writers and as women. As a consequence, their works

consisted of recurring images of “enclosure, suffocation, starvation, madness, death;

fantasies of escape and freedom appeared comparatively rarely” (Ferguson 16).

About the same time, poststructuralist and deconstructionist approach to the

analysis of the literary text underscored its precariousness, being subject to various

critical insights employed in its discussion. Both French and American feminist critics

began borrowing concepts from approaches like psychoanalysis to examine the

fundamental differences between women’s and men’s writing. Hence the major
 41

change brought about by feminist criticism is the interdisciplinary nature of literary

studies. Women’s studies obtained new dynamism when feminists introduced to the

study and research in literature, the research findings in such fields as history,

religion, psychology, political science, sociology, anthropology, economic studies,

and linguistics.

Although ‘feminism’ appears monolithic, cohesive and easily definable, it is,

in fact, far from that. Feminist criticism unravels its multiplicity of approaches and

complexity of issues as one goes closer to it. It is this multiplicity that has indeed

enriched the feminist movement with its relevance spreading farther and wider.

Underlying the numerous feminisms are certain common beliefs of feminist critics

who generally agree that “the oppression of women is a fact of life, that gender leaves

its trace in literary texts and on literary history…” (Warhol and Herndl x).

Feminist thinking, says, Myra Jehlen, is in actuality ‘re’thinking, a probe into

how certain traditional “assumptions about women…enter into the fundamental

assumptions that organize all our thinking” (75). Feminist critics create an

unconventional context in which women’s experiences and their world are distinct

from that of the males, and are no longer submerged in a man’s world. Gender and

gender-based oppression is another rubric which characterizes feminist criticism. But

‘gender’ has no clear-cut definition and is a debatable term. While some writers use it

to mean biological sex – male, female —many argue for a distinction between biology

and culture. According to the latter theorists, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are not

preordained by the body itself, but are constructed within culture. Hence, if the

‘female’ could be a matter of sex, the ‘feminine’, a matter of culture. Some feminists

use this distinction as a key to confront ‘essentialism’ or a deterministic stance that

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‘biology is destiny’. Others uphold the biological aspects of femaleness like

childbearing, lactation, menstruation, as unique characteristics encouraging women to

celebrate difference from the male ‘norm’. The French feminist theorists for whom

‘feminine’ means both ‘female’ and ‘feminine’, however, outrightly oppose the

binary opposition of sex and gender, arguing that the cultural differences are basically

implanted on the basis of biological particulars. Nonetheless, all these versions of

‘gender’ and its connotations are brought to bear upon literary studies. From the

beginning of the 1980s, American feminist theorists became more and more certain

that “gender, having a significant impact on experience, must make important

differences in the production and evaluation of literary texts” (Warhol 71).

Andrienne Munich has identified the examination of female characters in

men’s writings, as one of the earliest “feminine projects” in literary studies. She notes

that feminist critics like Simone de Beauvoir (1952), Mary Ellman (1968), and Kate

Millet (1969) found ample evidence of ‘misogyny’ in the male portrayal of female

characters and in gender descriptions in general. This led several feminist critics to

realize the inability of male writers to render a factual, pragmatic depiction of women

and their lives. Therefore, they were convinced that

(To) read male-authored texts…would be merely to encounter those

stereotypes and those attitudes towards women that constitute a dreary

record of women’s question. (Consequently), feminist criticism

concentrated upon recovering works written by women, to set the

record straight, to correct the imbalance, and to restore to critical

attention authentic female voices. As a result of this work, discredited

and disregarded women authors…have been accorded, if not full

literary honours, at least a serious consideration… (Munich 242).

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The ensuing question would be if the development of a woman-centred

perspective in literary criticism is more revolutionary than addressing the immediate

social forms that sexual discrimination takes. Maggie Humm tries to answer this by

saying that literary texts which are largely records of human mind, attitudes and

ideologies, have excluded “any concept of woman as an independent professional” (5).

This has led the feminist critics to use literary criticism as an integral weapon of

feminist struggle. In Sexual Politics, Millet discusses the mechanism by which men

have kept women subordinate. It is their utility to men that has determined women’s

value in society. Since the images of women in literature have been largely male

representations, female characters have been presented in their stereotypical roles –

serving as ‘foils, rewards, coverlets, motivators, and as impediments to males’ who

actively undertake their own interests and identities. Women writers, especially after

the beginning of the women’s movement, have been trying to find ways not only to

offset the universal stereotypes and the dismal emotions they induce, but to create

new images. Voicing their self-perception through explicit expression of anger,

frustration, desire, and dream, women writers disclose the futility of perpetuating

stereotypical thinking and its stifling effect on individuals and society.

Feminist criticism revealed about the 1970s that studies of almost every

country and period, besides of many individual writers, ascertained the preponderance

of repressive, if not negative, images of women in literature by men. At the same

time, the belief that ‘women wrote in the way they were allowed to write’, that

women were left with no alternative but to write in accordance with the male

dominant modes, also came to be negated by recent research. The retrieval of

women’s writings of the past which may have been undervalued, censured or

censored then, revealed that there were abundant examples of women writers who
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demystified and invalidated the mythical stereotypes, by portraying women as active,

formidable, diplomatic; as achieving psychological, sexual, social and economic

independence, albeit, in their own discrete ways.

The Enterprise Called ‘Writing’ in India

Today the female quest for identity is one of the most indispensable global

phenomena. However, the socio-cultural-psychic discrepancies caused by various

traditions could result in subtle variations within the nature and ways of the women’s

struggle from place to place. Such a quest in an ancient tradition-bound country like

India would be obviously different and more multifarious compared to that in

tradition-free younger societies. Vina Mazumdar draws attention to the difference

between western and Indian views of womanhood. Although oppression is a common

factor between the two, the causes of oppression, she says, are different. In India,

women seem to have been oppressed not because they are considered deficient, but

because they are believed to be potent with capacities. Woman, in India, has always

been regarded as ‘shakti’ or ‘power, strength’, in rough translation. It was this image

of woman that was indeed harnessed during the nationalist movement. The term

‘woman’ was used to suggest images of the mother goddess compared with the

mother nation, of woman as ‘shakti’. Mythical images of woman like ‘Kali’ and

‘Durga’ were popularized to build up a heroic Indian tradition with ‘powerful woman’

as its foundation of strength. At the same time, the social and religious reform

movements like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj focused on elevating the

social status of women through education and the amendment of familial and social

norms towards widows and minor girls. In the thick of the nationalist struggle, Gandhi

beckoned another aspect of the Indian woman’s identity to action and accentuated the
 45

moral superiority of feminine qualities like the power to sacrifice, patience and

endurance vis-a-vis masculine intolerance and belligerence. In fact, the entire

nationalist discourse on women’s role in nation building and in society was rife with

incongruities and brought to the fore the various dimensions of the biases against

woman in India. Unfortunately, as always, “women’s lives were placed in a

conflictual situation as there were contradictory ideologies governing their position in

society” (Jain, 38). In brief, ‘woman’ in India was becoming a product of imaging

through myth and history, through projection and imitation of archetypal characters

like Sita and Savitri. Such imaging, Jain argues, “is an imposition and has an element

of control. It confers a certain passivity on the subject which is cast in an image” (11).

Jain further states that myth and history, normally viewed as neutral, are never

neutral. She considers them as “hegemonic structures” with “gender dimensions”. If

“myth marginalizes women, history excludes them” (12).

On the one hand, myth tries to pigeonhole women in acceptable or

objectionable images by emphasizing on stereotypical characteristics like chastity,

sexual abstinence, self-control, sexual fidelity, and patience as marks of a ‘woman’.

On the other, history records the past as seen by men, where women are largely

ignored or given but a passing mention. Tharu and Lalita note:

It was in the forties and fifties that many of the myths, the institutions,

the discursive and narrative regimes that have secured the popular

misunderstanding of our history, our tradition, our identity, and our

problems today…began to take on their current configuration (44).

The women’s status in India is indivisibly linked with the wider social status

of India that no endorsement of women’s interests is possible without submitting to

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the varied socio-politico-cultural and religious issues of existence and survival. Also

in India, as discussed earlier, a monolithic picture of women’s position is difficult to

provide due to the multiplicity and complexity of its cultures and traditions. Another

serious difficulty is of locating reliable sources which can help construct a profile of

‘Indian woman’. This problem has been foregrounded by viewing history – social and

literary – from the subaltern and feminist perspective. While on the one hand,

historical documents that have been discovered and used by the ‘mainstream’ scholars

tend to be discriminatory, on the other hand, historians who attempted to build up

history, from the very beginning, only perpetuated the patriarchal stance towards

women and thereby paid little attention to the role of women in history, except while

referring to the exceptional women. Traditional scholars have effectively created the

impression that women were greatly honoured in ancient India from Vedic times,

enjoyed freedom, good status and learning opportunities, and that the decline in the

woman’s status was the result of later foreign invasions. In reality, however, feminist

researches have ascertained that the ancient times were as ambivalent and sexist as the

recent times with regard to women’s status in India. Jasbir Jain discusses how some of

women’s histories written by women on rare occasions demystify the eulogized

depiction of women’s past by men. She cites the example of an anonymously

published book in Hindi during the end of the 19th century titled Simantini Upadesh.

The book discusses the woman question, laying bare every practice right from the use

of jewelry, the wealthy lifestyle, married life and its connotations, family

relationships, sexuality, widow remarriage, religion and the perception of ‘dharma’ in

relation to women. A large and growing body of women’s literature in India,

unearthed from oblivion by feminist historiographers and literary critics, indicates that

the socialization process for girls begins with lessons in accepting femininity, a role
 47

equated with dependence, compliance, conformity and passivity. In the chapter on

‘pativrata dharma’ the author of Simantini Upadesh complains that the sole duty

assigned to women by all the scriptures is duty towards the husband which

consequentially plunks her to a second-rate status (11-23). In her revealing narration

of the status of an upper-caste woman of the Hindu community in India, Pandita

Ramabai Saraswati exposes the discriminatory laws of the religion. Bulldozing the

Manusmriti and its hypocritical and dual natured norms for women, she writes,

religion, as the word is commonly understood (in India), has two

distinct natures in the Hindu Law, the masculine and the feminine. The

masculine religion has its own peculiar duties, privileges and honours.

The feminine religion has its own peculiarities (58).

The work movingly narrates how the Hindu scriptures entrusted woman to the

single and supreme duty of serving her husband resulting in a horde of errands and

constrictions superimposed on her.

Another nineteenth century work entitled Amar Jiban (1876), the

autobiography of Rassundari Devi in Bengali, translated into English by Enakshi

Chatterjee as My Life, discloses the manner in which a Hindu woman was “immersed

in the sea of household work” (Chatterjee 6). It recounts the heartrending story of the

young housewife Rassundari Devi’s struggle to learn to read and write. The modern

reader would be utterly surprised to read how a woman’s desire and endeavor to

become educated was considered as vile. Despite the antagonistic atmosphere at home

and in the society, Rassundari persistently tries to achieve her wish and at the age of

sixty six, writes her autobiography which offers a new facet to the mostly untold

history of laywomen of Bengal, of India.

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These and several other polemical works written by women in the past stand

testimony to the restrictive role society and religion played in the lives of women.

Nevertheless, not all women’s writing can be considered feminist. But the issues of

gender and the place of women in literature are the most important aspects of feminist

discourse. Since in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, women have been

conventionalized into their ‘given’ roles, to cognize and register one’s ‘real self’ and

not the ‘given self’ is to break through the very edifice of culture. Rukmini Bhaya

Nair writes,

Culture itself, within this strong sociological paradigm …is visualized

as a predominantly male domain. Therefore, women’s role, by

definition, involves sneaking into culture, stealing into it, and

breaching ‘natural’ boundaries (215).

A considerable number of women Vedic scholars, Buddhist nuns, Jain nuns,

Virashaivas of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the Varkaras of Maharashtra, Alvars

and Nayanars of Tamilnadu, and many others who wrote in Marathi (Janabai), Prakrit

and Gujarati (Mirabai) engaged themselves in writing right from the Vedic times

down to the end of the 15th century. Most of these writers addressed themselves

“exclusively and safely to god, giving (their) personal emotions dignity and universal

validity by identifying them with those of a god or goddess…” (Ray 181). If some

women writers wrote under divine inspiration, Kumari Molla, a potter woman of the

early 16th century wrote a scholarly version of the Ramayana in Telugu which is

revered even today as a standard work. Another scholarly writer Madhuravani was the

court pandita of Raja Raghunath of Tanjore in the 16th century. She too composed a

version of the Ramayana. The unfinished Ramayana by a Bengali poetess named

Chandravati is still not forgotten in East Bengal. In the Kashmiri language Lalla-
 49

vakyani, a collection of verses on Shaiva philosophy by a woman identified as Lalla,

Lalleshwari or as Lal Ded are popular and are oft quoted even today. Her succinctness

of expression and mysticism are said to be unmatched. Similarly, the sensitive lyrics

of Habba Khatun, the queen of Yusuf Shah Chak, the last king of Kashmir before the

invasion by Moghuls, are admired to this day. The lyrics of Arnimal, an eighteenth

century Hindu scholar of Kashmir, are still sung. While all these writers, mainly

poets, wrote in a scholarly tradition different from that of the women Bhakta poets,

there existed alongside this a folk tradition which was entirely oral. Lila Ray remarks

that the folk literature lent the kind of anonymity that women needed for an explicit

vent for their feelings. Folk literature, in all the Indian languages, is by and large

women’s literature, and is replete with the numerous and the minutest feelings of

women. The capacity of women for reaction and expression when under the cover of

anonymity speaks for the constraints they suffered in articulating in the open.

It was in the 18th century, with the publication of Radhika Santwanam by

Muddupalani, a Telugu poet in the court of Pratapasimha of Tanjore, that the modern

period in women’s writing is said to have come to its threshold in India. She was one

among the courtesans who had had access to education. She was, however, a rare one

as she achieved literary perfection and fame unlike other educated courtesans. Pravin

Ray Raturi, also a courtesan, but of the Hindi heartland, was another exception with

her innumerable short poems in Hindi achieving high reputation. Discussing the fame

and acclaim Muddupalani received during her times, and about the endeavors of

several eminent literary women at the court of Pratapasimha, her royal patron, Tharu

and Lalita write,

…nourished by the social and political changes (during the 18th

century) associated with the medieval movements of artisanal

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rebellion…was the growth of literatures (along with the development

of literary forms), secular as well as spiritual, which extended the

contexts of courtly literature as they drew for their themes on the

everyday lives of the artisanal classes. These movements brought into

the scope of literary language a whole new ‘technical’ vocabulary

based on their experience. Secular prose narratives had also begun to

make an appearance (7).

By nineteenth century, the British regime sought to underrate the Indian

society on the basis of the treatment meted out to women in general. Besides,

claiming its clout over the minds of the people and their land, it began to undermine

the appeal and authority of Indian literatures and understated the societies that created

them. It is a known fact that several years before English literature was taught in the

British universities, it was introduced in the Indian curriculum. All these testify to the

colonial interests that worked to restructure gender and the curricular

institutionalization of literature to its benefit. Together with this the traditional

restrictions on women in India perpetually hindered them from being able to speak

freely, in their own voices. The objection to women’s learning was so deep-seated in

the Indian society that it was considered as an evil. Education of woman was a taboo

as it was supposed to make her unfit for family life. The indigenous social reformers

crusaded against child marriage and illiteracy of women. Many schools were opened

exclusively for them. The introduction of English language as the medium of

instruction significantly changed the outcome of the education system. It provided a

gateway to the ideology of liberalism which enshrined the values of liberty, equality,

respect for individual, and secularism although the application of these values was

limited in colonial India. Spread of education, participation in the nationalist

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movement, growing industrialization, and growth of women’s organizations and

enactment of social legislations facilitated the enhancement of women’s status.

However, this change was not uniform to women of all classes and castes. Most of

them led their life in silence, a silence so poignant that Jamuneshwari Khataniyar, a

young Assamese poet who died before she was twenty-four wrote,

…In silence my hopes rise and sink,

In silence I find my heart’s delight,

In silence I walk through eternal light,

In silence I bear my defeat and triumph,

In silence I die and in silence am born (Ray 186).

Nonetheless, the political awakening and the rising interest in social reform

and their effects widened the sphere of experience upon which educated women could

write. Their physical participation in nation building infused in them a new vigour and

mental freedom which made them, as Ray describes, “ardent patriots, feminists,

educationists, social workers, journalists, editors, novelists and short story writers” (187).

Ray opines that the short story and the short novel were apparently most suited for the

burgeoning creative expression in women writers. While a large number of women

writers of almost all the Indian languages began to write in their mother tongue, a

considerable number of them successfully experimented with the English language.

The educated women seemed to be fascinated by the Western methods of intellectual

inquiry and the attitude of the mind fostered by them. Naturally, they became eager,

as soon as they had obtained the basic knowledge and skill, to employ them for

reviewing and comprehending their own past and contemporary condition. In this

effort, they created a large volume of writing, both in English and in their own

languages. The trend continued and flourished in the 20th century and Ismat Chugtai,
 52

Vaidehi and Shashi Deshpande occupy a pride of place in Indian literature through

their radical, discerning, and persistent exploration of the lives and consciousness of

women in India.

Chugtai

“…in the India of the Thirties and Forties, writing by and about women was

tentative; it was generally held that literature had no place in women’s lives. Making a

break with tradition, Ismat proved that this was a fallacy” (Naqvi 2003, vii). Ismat

Chugtai, one of India’s bravest and the most uninhibited women writers, chose to

write in Urdu, the mother tongue of herself and her characters.

Born in Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, in 1915, Ismat Chugtai grew up largely in

Jodhpur where her father was a civil servant. Right from childhood Ismat hated to fit

into the specified mould of a girl and always wanted to do all that the boys did.

Incidentally, when Ismat was still very young, her three sisters had already got

married. Hence, she spent a large part of her childhood in the company of her six

brothers, a factor to which she attributes her candid nature that subsequently trickled

into her writing. As a young girl she also had the opportunity of experiencing urban

middle-class existence as her father Qasim Beg Chugtai was a civil servant and served

in different capacities at Jodhpur, Aligarh, Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow, Mewar and many

other places. She was part of a large family being the ninth among ten children. The

household always had innumerable visitors and relatives that filled the house with

affection, humour, repartee, quarrel, discomfort, wit and what not. In her own words,

“our family was progressive, but this attitude was acceptable only for boys. I was after

all just a girl. Every woman in the family – mother, aunt, sister – was terrorized.

Society had fixed a station for her. If she overstepped these limits, she would have to
 53

pay the price. Too much education was dangerous” (Kumar and Sadique 28).

Obviously, Ismat could not gain education easily. She had to fight for it as education

was considered unnecessary and harmful for girls, among the middle-class Muslim

households. When her father was posted in Sambhar in Rajasthan, he had to move the

family from Aligarh where Ismat was in her ninth grade in school. Sambhar was

known to be a remote place and Ismat was reluctant to accompany her parents. She

wished to continue her education in Aligarh staying in a hostel; but they refused her

request. The claustrophobic environment in Sambhar stifled her to the extent of

compelling her to speak to her parents in revolt. She threatened them that she would

leave the house, get into any train, get down at any station and ask people for a

Mission school. “Once I reach there I’ll become a Christian. Then I can study as much

as I want” (Chugtai xiv). If the mother was besieged by her nerve, the father was

urged to think about the matter. Her passionate desire to complete matriculation

compelled him to agree to send her back to the school at Aligarh where she could stay

in a hostel. This was her first taste of success as a girl of her times. The struggle,

though, would not end here. Around the same time when she was barely fifteen, talks

about her marriage started taking the rounds in the family. She was horrified by the

idea because her friends “were married off around the age of twelve and I saw their

lives….the whole business of marriage seemed to be dreadful –sex, cooking, beatings

from mother-in-law and all the other in-laws” (Tharu and Lalita 127). She somehow

escaped the calamity with her firmness and dexterity.

Ismat came under the literary influence of her brother Azeem Beg Chugtai,

who was a noted writer himself. He introduced her to the world of Dostoyevsky,

Chekov, Thomas Hardy and a host of renowned writers. He also taught her English

and history and later the Islamic Holy Scriptures. She claimed to owe her learning in
 54

the conventions of storytelling to O’Henry. Reading her own brother’s short stories

and of the popular and widely read Urdu romantic authors of the time like Hijab

Ismail, Majnun Gorakhpuri and Niaz Fatehpuri and of the serious Hindi writers like

Premchand, she ventured into writing secretly. She authored some melodramatic

stories and kept them hidden from the eyes of all. Soon she discovered the

shallowness of what she had written and engaged herself in a serious reading of world

literature.

At this juncture, in 1933, she had to fight another battle with her parents to get

permission to study at Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow for her bachelor’s

degree. College life opened the doors to a new world of knowledge through the

innumerable and variety of books she read on many subjects. The study of history and

politics “made her aware of the complicity of religion with politics in perpetuating

patriarchy” (Asaduddin xv). After completing her B.A., Chugtai worked as a teacher

at a girls’ school in Bareilly. This was a brief stint as she soon joined Aligarh Muslim

University to acquire training in teaching. To join the university, however, she along

with six other women students had to lobby for admission and were allowed to

register only if they would sit in purdah, behind a curtain at the back of the class, a

common practice in the 1920s and 30s in universities where Muslim women studied.

“If we could get what we wanted by sitting in purdah we would sit in purdah. We

were interested in studying. If they had told us to wear burqas, we would have

agreed,” Chugtai reminisces (Tharu and Lalita 127).

By the time she turned twenty-three, Ismat was ready for sensitive writing.

She had read the best in Urdu and English fiction and thought she was mature enough

to take up writing seriously. In 1936, while she was completing her B.A., she attended
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the first meeting of the Progressive Writer’s Movement in Lucknow, at which Munshi

Premchand, the writer whom she grew up reading, was also present. It was here that

she met Rasheed Jahan, a writer of autonomous character, stern individuality and who

promoted women’s liberation through education. She was completely awed by

Rasheed Jahan’s revolutionary personality. “After seeing and hearing her,” Chugtai

records, the candle like fingers, the lime blossoms, and the crimson dresses of her

stories “all vanished into thin air. The earthy Rasheed Apa simply shattered all my

ivory idols to pieces…. Life, stark naked, stood before me” (Tharu and Lalita 128).

Being the first Muslim woman to have both B.A. and B.T. degrees, she was

appointed the Principal at the Girls’ College in Bareilly. Later she went to Bombay as

Inspector of Schools. Chugtai met her life partner Shahid Latif in Aligarh. They

became such thick friends that their friendship became a scandal due to which they

decided to get married. She was twenty nine then. Shahid Latif later became a film

director and Chugtai too wrote scripts for five films. She lived in Bombay with their

two daughters until her demise in 1991.

Chugtai’s name as a short story writer shot to fame with the publication of her

story ‘Lihaf’ (The Quilt) in 1942, which came as a breakthrough not only in Urdu

short story writing, but in women’s writing itself. In protest against the alleged

obscenity in the story, scores of irate letters were written to the editor of the Urdu

literary journal ‘Adab-e-Latif’ in which it was published. The colonial government

stepped in to charge Chugtai with obscenity, “a charge that she chose to contest in

court despite being advised to apologise and avoid a fine” (Gopal 65). The writer was

accused of writing on lesbianism and it was argued, respectable women did not write

about such things. The trial lasted for two years and finally the court acquitted
 56

Chugtai as it could not find any precise reference either to sexual activity or to lesbian

relationships in the story. Her lawyer argued that it could be perceived by only those

who were aware of lesbianism. Also the presiding judge passed the verdict that the

‘censurable’ did not amount to the ‘illegal’.

‘Lihaf’ became one of her landmark stories that got widely anthologized.

Nonetheless, Chugtai’s artistic brilliance and keenness of observation unmistakably

manifest in her other stories as well. She transfigured the genre of short story with her

“socialist outlook, accompanied by the use of non-traditional techniques to tell a

story.” She broke apart from the romantic, instructional and reformist style of her

women precursors like Begum Yaldram, Hajab Ismail and Begum Nazar Sajjad

whose “characters and subject matter (remained) stifled and unbelievable.” She set a

trend of boldness and candor in the women writers like Qurratulain Hyder, Mumtaz

Shireen, Sarla Devi, Sadiqa Begum and many others who followed her

(Naqvi 2006, xiii-iv).

Chugtai’s themes hovered around the life in large families, a subject she was

most well acquainted with. The house in which she grew up always had aunts, uncles,

cousins, young boys and girls, servants and neighbours who appear vividly in her

stories. Critics accuse Chugtai of being confined to a limited set of themes, which is

true enough. However, her stories are but realistic reflections of the cultural and

familial position of women in Indian society. She wrote what she saw, what she knew,

and about what disturbed her. The characters that inhabit her fiction are from the

middle-class – relatives, servants, neighbours, teenagers – people found in everyday

life. Chugtai’s language is “direct, colloquial and down to earth… (her)

diction…unique (with) rich idioms…colourful, robust and completely understood”

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(Naqvi 2006, xvi). Chugtai wrote novels, film scripts, plays and travelogues but she

is exceptional in her short stories. Asaduddin, who has translated many of Chugtai’s

well known and lesser known, but equally important, stories into English in the

collection The Veil remarks,

Her creative temperament was suited to this genre where a single

human situation is dramatized and a single protagonist or at the most

two or three characters, are given prominence. Her sparkling dialogue,

brilliant turn of phrase and scintillating humour – the essential

ingredients of her style – achieve startling effect when she works on a

small canvas with a few bold strokes. She uses this canvas not only as

the social and cultural matrix for her characters, but also as the psychic

landscapes on which the human drama is played out (xviii).

Chugtai’s stories focus chiefly on the predicament of women in the India that

is in transition from subjection to the British rule to political independence. Similarly

as the Indian nation state is transforming, woman in India too is changing over from

“gendered colonial subject to gendered national citizen” (Gopal 69). The ‘New

Woman’ of the transitional period, who is anticipating and striving for a future,

nonetheless with the traditional inputs from the past – is Indian as well as un-Indian,

in its specified sense. “‘Becoming modern’ in transitional times entails a constant and

difficult negotiation of contradictory imperatives for the young Indian Muslim

woman” (Gopal 77) which is reflected in the characters of Chugtai who are oppressed

by patriarchy and religion, and yet show signs of upheaval and remonstration in their

own distinct, restrained ways.

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The backdrop of her later stories is the ‘independent’ India which is forging

towards ‘modernity’. Paradoxically, her protagonists are the victims of the kind of

modernity that, as Gopal aptly describes, “is rife with failures and betrayals at both

the personal and the political levels” (81). Chugtai’s characters are a reflection of

herself who is quoted to have said “Contradiction marks existence…. Countless

questions are wrestling with each other in my mind. Resolving them, disrupting them,

and then resolving them again, this is my life” (Gopal 86). Her characters are both

objects and subjects of change or otherwise in their lives.

Chugtai’s was a solitary voice at the time, a woman shearing off her ties from

tradition, both in literary and social terms. She lived like a ‘terhi lakir’ (crooked line –

also the title of one of her best known novels) till the end of her life. Renowned as the

‘Grand Dame of Urdu Fiction’, she is regarded as one of the four sturdy pillars of

Urdu short story writing (the other three being Krishan Chander, Sadat Hasan Manto,

and Rajinder Singh Bedi). Tahira Naqvi writes about Chugtai as being “The

indomitable spirit of ‘Urdu Afsana’, the last chronicler of the U.P. Muslim culture and

its associated semantics” (2003, xx). Chugtai breathed her last on 24 October 1991,

leaving behind her a valuable and intricate narrative of the lives of those women who

would have otherwise been disregarded and relegated into a void in the inequitable

chronicles of history.

Vaidehi

In the wake of the nationalist uprising, the revolutionary social reforms, and

the introduction of English education in India, a new wave of literary movement

called the ‘Navodaya’, literally ‘a new awakening’, swept across the world of

Kannada literature. The movement was filled with the fervor to uphold idealist,
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liberalist and humanist ideologies not completely breaking away from the traditional

values of the past. This period is especially significant as it facilitated the surfacing of

women from the claustrophobic environment of home and family into the outer world,

to a considerable extent. The newly educated woman, infused with the ‘Navodaya’

ideology, began to voice her thoughts in writing. However, her subjects were

invariably family-centric, for although physically she had stepped out of her home,

her mind continued to reside in the inner recesses of ‘the home’. Hundreds of women

writers began to write but their varied concerns were related to family and the role of

women in it. These writings naturally portrayed women in the way the society wanted

to see them, and not as they essentially were or wanted to become. Most women

writers seemed to believe and promulgate the characteristic beliefs about woman and

cast her in the similar formulaic roles that she had been depicted in from centuries by

male writers.

The writers who wrote between the 1950s and 1970s were regarded as the

‘Navya’, the ‘modern’ writers in the Kannada literary world. They were a new

generation of writers with a changing socio-economic and educational atmosphere. In

relation to women, it was a time when they aspired to become ‘like men’ in terms of

education and career. Besides, the education they received was not of their choice, but

what was prescribed and designed by males for them. Woman was to be educated so

that she could become an able administrator and care taker of her husband and

children. To have an educated woman for a wife was a plume in the patriarchal crown

of the husband. She too basked in the praise she received for being an ‘ideal wife’ and

seemed to remain oblivious to the fact that she lost her uniqueness, her personality in

the bargain. The writings of many women in Kannada reflect such ‘romantic’ and

‘content’ housewives, in their female characters. The bigoted male response to such
 60

writing was either a sympathetic encouragement or an absolute scorn as they

considered most of women’s writing as nondescript and shallow.

The women writers of this time do not attempt at all to explore the

intensity, immediacy and complexity of issues. Even when faced with

the toughest problems they trivialize them; find an easy answer to

them. Behind this is a huge optimism. Therefore they result in an

artificially romantic end (Priyadarshini 365).

Vaidehi, renowned as a path breaking writer in modern Kannada literature,

took up writing seriously around the same time, in the 1970s. Subbarao, an English

teacher and critic in Karnataka, calls Vaidehi a “quiet crusader” who in her own

subtle way interrogated “the patriarchal text within the remnant tradition” during the

1970s when feminist movement in Europe had swept over the literary and cultural

ambience in India bringing about drastic changes in both. He regards her as “a

sustained story teller with a penchant for uncovering the hidden agenda of patriarchy”

(2008). Vaidehi published her first collection of short stories Mara Gida Balli in 1979

which is considered important in several ways. In his foreword to the collection, her

publisher and founder of the legendary ‘Ninasam’ theatre repertory in Karnataka,

K.V. Subbanna, says that the steady and natural growth of Vaidehi as a writer is

evident in the stories of the collection. The stories are honest records of her true

experiences written without the apprehension or qualm that they could be disregarded

as inconsequential. The stories, he says, achieve a moderation in tone and have a

direct appeal on the reader.

In her analysis of Vaidehi as a prominent writer in the Kannada language,

Sandhya Reddy describes her as an example of the height a woman writer can reach
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with the unique depth and variety in her writing (395). Vaidehi’s stories depict and

explore the lives and experiences of those women who lived amidst the society but

were victims of gross neglect both in society and in the pages of literature. “Her

writing is a new milestone in Kannada literature,” remarks Vijaya Dabbe (qtd in

Tharu and Lalita 533), writer and well-regarded critic, about Vaidehi’s fiction.

Born in Kundapura, a small town in coastal Karnataka, in 1945, Vaidehi grew

up as the tenth among the fourteen children in a middle-class Brahmin family. Her

father was already 50 when she was born and her mother was his second wife who

entered his house as not only a wife to him but as a mother to his five children from

the first wife who had passed away. She was named Janaki, but adopted the pen name

Vaidehi, when she sent her first story to ‘Sudha’, a leading Kannada weekly then, for

publication while she was in college. Born in a large, traditional house teeming with

children, relatives, guests, servants, and family friends, Vaidehi always felt she

belonged to a little world. She grew up at a time when honour, rather than money or

education, was the most treasured value in families like hers. Children, especially

daughters, could study only if educational facilities were available close to home.

Fortunately for Janaki, who had not yet become Vaidehi, by the time she completed

school, a college came up in her hometown. As she herself has narrated in several of

her interviews, she was keen on enrolling herself to the college. But with fourteen

children at home, it was impossible to give higher education to all. There was just not

enough money. Apart from that there was the fear of what would happen if girls were

sent for higher studies? ‘Where to find a man with an M.A for a girl with a B.A?’ was

a problem. Finally with the support of her elder sister’s husband and an uncle who

convinced her mother that her further education would not fall heavily upon the

family, she was allowed to take up B.Com. Fortunately, she was able to get a loan
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scholarship of Rs 750 a year with the help of which she could complete her degree

course. As Vaidehi says in her inimitable sense of humour,

Before I began my college life, my mother made me promise that I

would not fall in love with anybody there! I readily gave her my word,

just to gain her consent. I was ultimately forced to keep my promise

not so much because I wished to, but because I didn’t meet anyone

worth falling in love with! (2004, 200)

Vaidehi’s father was a learned advocate, and an ardent lover of literature. Her

eldest brother studied English literature while she was still a child, and he used to

narrate stories by great writers to her and the other children in the household. Even

though she wouldn’t understand much as a child, she developed a liking and

reverence for literature. Vaidehi reminisces in one of her interviews how growing up

in such an atmosphere led them to bring out a literary magazine called ‘Sahitya Jyoti’

at home, edited by her third brother. She recalls her writing a story for it, titled

‘Roopa’s Wedding’. The story, Vaidehi says, was “along the lines of simple novels

that I read. The language I used was also not mine…. I had to go a long way before I

realized that what I was then writing was not in my language and not about what I felt

and thought” (2004, 198).

Vaidehi grew up in an atmosphere where a girl child faced many restrictions.

Girls never used to read newspapers; always sat on the floor and never in chairs; did

not speak loudly; would not appear in the front court of the house; would not question

or argue with anyone –all this because they were girls. Although she and her sisters

received primary and secondary education, higher education had still not become

common in smaller towns like hers. However, in cities, women’s education, at least
 63

among the upper caste and classes, was catching up. Recollecting those days, Vaidehi

observes that most of the girls then, aspired to get educated as merely a means to get

better husbands and to gain an advantage over other girls of their own age,

community or class.

A year after she completed her degree, Vaidehi was married. When she was

planning to do her M.Com, after B.Com, a marriage proposal came her way. When

the boy consented to marry her, and her brothers asked for her assent, she wept

profusely as she didn’t want to marry anyone. Nobody seemed to understand why she

was crying and Vaidehi thought it was pointless to try and explain when they were not

moved by her tears. So she acquiesced, although she never intended to get married at

all. Marriage came as a turning point in her so far well-protected and complacent life.

Her “traumatic experiences in (her) in-laws’ house provided (her) with the impetus to

write”, as she has revealed in one of her interviews (2004, 205). She doubts whether

she would pursue writing if she led a happy, satisfied life. Writing, she says, was a life

saver amidst the whirlpool of familial problems she suffered. “I took my difficulties at

my in-laws’ place as human problems, not just as my personal ones. I needed to write

in order to love, to weep, to run away and look back, and to interpret” (2004, 205). In

another interview she says,

Life in my in-laws’ house sobered me up; increased my looking

inward; brought up the necessity to write…. In those days after

marriage, I was like a calf lost in the jungle. What I used to write at

that time had no connection with my state of mind, but was just a

strategy designed to help me forget my tribulations (2006, xxv).

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She endured all that a girl brought up in an innocent and god-fearing

atmosphere would naturally suffer in a purely materialistic and absurd environment.

As a woman she felt humiliated that she was supposed to shut up and do only what

was expected of her, rather than say or do what she wanted to. Fortunately, she says,

her husband who had married her especially because she was interested in writing,

had provided her with a table and a chair. Her table, her chair and her writing helped

her face all the odds. Instead of writing about her own problems, she wrote about

those of others, to see through them and thereby forget her own.

Although she had begun to write well before marriage, Vaidehi pursued it

seriously only later. In most of her stories, her protagonists speak the dialect of

Kannada that is spoken in Kundapura, her hometown. According to Vaidehi, the use

of a language is important in portraying a character within her or his own

environment. She was once suggested by a renowned writer in Kannada, that the use

of a dialect of Kannada would limit her readership. She thought it over. It seemed to

her that expressing herself through her characters was more important for her than

planning her expression in terms of readership.

Vaidehi felt that she had to write in order to discover the truth of the struggles

she had both witnessed and experienced. “In the process of writing,” she says, “I

realized that all our struggles were human, related to human relationships and beyond

gender” (2004, 209). Vaidehi chose to write short stories as she loved the narrative

style. Moreover, in the household she grew up, there was an uninterrupted narrative

process going on around her with the inner courtyard of the house being full of

stories. To her, the story became an effective medium to understand the complexity in

human lives. To her the storyline is less important than what it actually looks for,

using the story as a means.

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Vaidehi is not particularly interested in writing her autobiography as she

believes that her experiences are part of the lengthy autobiography of all the women

on the earth. “Writing” to her, “is an exploration. In the course of this exploration, I

have been able to not only understand my own struggle but also the struggles I saw

around me” (2004, 212). In one of his talks about Vaidehi’s fiction, a prominent

modernist critic T.P. Ashoka says,

An experiential world hitherto not seen in Kannada literature takes

shape in Vaidehi’s fiction. Women’s inner desires, sorrows, promises,

dreams speak to us in whispers. Instead of feeling as though someone

is speaking on behalf of women with generosity, pity and compassion,

we feel as though the woman is laying bare her inner self in an

authentic manner. Vaidehi’s stories are unique for their subtle

delineation of human feelings and situations, for the steadfastness of

attention to detail, and for their artistic use of language (1995).

The indefinable nature of Vaidehi’s stories and their manifold intricacies make

them difficult to be addressed by critics. The concerns in her work constantly elude

conservative explanation. However, this elusiveness itself has been lauded by

modernist and feminist critics alike who are the two main kinds of critics addressing

Vaidehi’s work. Niranjana observes that

The modernist celebrates the complexity of (her) fiction’s characters

and the skill in using language, both of which are supposedly absent in

more obviously socially committed writing like that of the earlier

Progressives of the 1950s and 60s or the later Bandaaya or Rebel

period of the 1980s. The feminist critic emphasizes Vaidehi’s

representation of female experience, and her bringing to visibility the

nuances of daily life as they create a world of women (viii-ix).

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Vaidehi presently lives in Manipal of Udupi district in Karnataka, with her

husband after her two daughters are married and are pursuing their careers. She

continues to write not only stories but essays, biographies and children’s plays.

Vaidehi has this to say about writing as an act of expression:

Although I didn’t have many illusions about writing, I can say without

any hesitation that it strengthens what the world needs, the power to

comprehend life, to save love from growing bitter; it strengthens our

power to desire this comprehension, as well as our self-confidence. In

the final analysis, it’s a struggle to guard the flame of love’s lamp from

being extinguished by evil winds (2006, xxvi).

Vaidehi has constantly refused to be labeled as feminist as she considers her

concerns as human and beyond gender. Although she may not be a feminist in the

western theoretical sense of the term, her texts are deeply woman-centric in their

outlook. She does not attempt, apparently, to create a history of women or of

women’s writing. However, her stories are fine descriptions of male hegemony over

the lives of women. Her tales are silently defiant and negotiate a free will for women

amidst the severe and domineering strictures inflicted on them through the patriarchal

institutions like marriage and family.

Deshpande

India has a rich and interesting tradition of women writing in English dating

back to the early nineteenth century. The ideas about ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and

women’s emancipation had started to trickle in from the West which greatly

influenced the women writers in India. The new and revolutionary ideas about

political and social individual expanded the horizons of Indian women who from
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Vedic times to Buddhist nuns, bhakti saints and early modernist writers, spoke with

incredible freedom. In their endeavour to anthologize some of the important prose

writings in English by Indian women of the nineteenth century and also of the first

half of the twentieth century, Eunice De Souza and Lindsay Pereira discovered that

some such writings have received only a passing mention in ‘standard’ histories of

Indian writing in English. They regard many women writers in English of those times

as deserving more than such apathetic mention as they “took more than documentary

interest in the subject of their writing. The writing is alive. It is observant, sharp” (xii).

These women writers arrest the readers’ attention by the range and quality of their

writing which virtually explored all possibilities of human life with particular interest

in the position of women. However, De Souza and Pereira note that most of their

writings were with a cause – women’s education; depiction and thereby calling for an

erasure of the difficulties faced by child brides, wives and widows; franchise for

women; emphasizing the need to strengthen women economically; contributing to

legislation to improve the quality of women’s lives and a host of other socio-political

concerns. This leads one to wonder whether “most of the women (writers)… were so

caught up in women’s movements and the nationalist struggle that their

autobiographical writing tended to focus more on the public life than the inner

person” (De Souza and Pereira xix). It is found, surprisingly, that even the most

outstanding and progressive women writer like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay has

revealed nothing about her personal life in her highly acclaimed memoir Inner

Recesses and Outer Spaces.

The women’s writing after the 1970s seems to have gradually become

analytical both of the ‘society’ and of the ‘self’. Shashi Deshpande, who started

writing in the 70s, began with short stories. Her stories do not aim at direct criticism
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of the society her protagonists inhabit; but in the process of delving deep into

themselves and in reckoning with the fears, flaws and frustrations they harbor in their

minds, her characters reflect the familial and social norms that leave them inhibited.

Born in 1938 in Dharwad, Karnataka, Deshpande grew up in a house that was

exposed to many languages. Her father, Adya Rangacharya, popularly known as

Sriranga, was a professor in Sanskrit but wrote in Kannada, his mother tongue. He

sent Shashi to an English-medium convent school, as a result of which she

involuntarily learnt several languages at a time. While she spoke Kannada and

Marathi at home, she used English in School, and her father made her learn

‘Amarkosha’, a classic Sanskrit text by heart. Her family saw both good and bad

times. Her father was a man of principles and convictions and this earned respect for

himself and his family. But unable to betray his principle, he resigned to his job which

brought penury to the family. Her mother was a graduate in Marathi and Sanskrit in

the early 1930s but was a woman with limited ideas. To her, being loyal to her

husband was the ultimate goal. Young Shashi would sometimes get annoyed by her

mother’s unquestioning devotion to the husband. Deshpande claims her father to be a

greater influence on her rather than the mother who led a purely domestic life.

Deshpande describes herself as a tom boy who never wanted to do any “girly-

womanly things”. However, Deshpande recalls that it was due to her mother that she

experienced the pains and pleasures of a joint family. She used to visit her maternal

relatives every year but was completely cut off from her father’s family as he had not

kept up relationship with any of his. The interaction with the many uncles, aunts,

cousins, nephews and nieces, she thinks, gave her a complete understanding of the

family system in India which mattered a great deal when she began to write.
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Shashi grew up reading a lot of books in English. Studying in an English

medium school with no second language in those days left her with learning only

English. She had a working knowledge of Kannada, Sanskrit and Marathi, could read

these languages fairly well but could not write in them. She could think, dream, and

write only in English. The environment around her put her in a strange situation. She

heard Kannada and Marathi all around her, but was thinking and reading in English.

When she set out to write she had the big challenge of grafting the life around her

with a language that was alien to it. She found her predecessors Kamala Markandeya,

Anita Desai and Nayantara Sahgal “too exquisitely western…” She thought she was

not even like R.K. Narayan. She reminisces that she took quite some time to find her

own entity and identity as a writer, because for a long time she did not know where

she belonged in the literary tradition. “With my first novel Roots and Shadows, I was

still fumbling. There was a conscious translation of the culture into English. It was

there even with The Dark Holds No Terrors but with That Long Silence it was

completely gone” (2004, 52).

When Deshpande began her writing career she was in her thirties and was

raising a young family with two sons. Although she never thought of becoming a

writer she loved to write letters and her diary. When her husband, a pathologist, was a

Commonwealth Fellow in England, she too moved with him with their two small

children. In that one year, she wrote three write-ups about their stay in England which

got published in Deccan Herald. Encouraged by being published for the first time,

“the urge to write, the feeling that I can write, the thought that I want to write came

upon me,” she recollects. She took a course in journalism and worked for a magazine

called The Onlooker for sometime. Her first story “The Legacy” was written during

this stint as a journalist. From then onwards she didn’t look back. She wrote plenty of
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stories in the ensuing years which were published in various English magazines. She

considers her story writing years as the formative years for the novelist in her to

evolve.

…I started writing fiction after I was married and had had children,

when I was in my thirties, which is rather late by present trends. I

wrote several stories – bad, indifferent and good, but I wrote. And that

was the learning process. That is how you discover yourself as a writer

and develop your characters (2004, 54).

Deshpande ceased to write short stories once she got more absorbed in the

larger canvas of the novel. Nonetheless, as Dwivedi remarks in his study of Shashi

Deshpande’s shorter fiction, “Thematically and technically, (her) shorter fiction is, in

many ways, identical to her larger fiction, and it would be worthwhile to trace a

common thread running through both of them” (172). Her stories are not tales of

victimized women, but of self-conscious, thinking women who analyze their situation.

In fact, she writes about people and their personal realities. Replying to a question on

what interested her as a writer, Deshpande says,

People. I found people absolutely fascinating. I also found all the

things I had felt about women coming out in my writing. I was not a

conscious feminist but I was always very angry with the ‘women go

inside’ attitude. I hated the religious rituals that put women in their

place…. At the time I had not heard the word feminism. It was much

later that a neighbor asked me, after reading my stories: have you read

Simone de Beauvoir? I hadn’t even heard of her… (2004, 54-5).

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Most of her initial stories were written to order for different magazines. Their

request to her for stories “was only the nudge (she) needed to write stories which were

already there, stories of people who were waiting inside (her)” (2003, xvii). In a span

of twenty years, from 1970 to 1990, she wrote about 90 stories after which her story

writing diminished because of absorption with her novels. Writing, for her, has

always been “about looking for your own truths” (2004, Vol II, x).

Deshpande could never relate herself with the kind of writing in English that

was happening around her. Compared to the present trend, she started writing late in

her life but was never worried about the market for her fiction as she did not set out to

cater to a specific reader. Her inclination was more towards representing the truth of

human reality rather than presenting mere facts. Due to the spontaneity and unself-

consciousness in her writing, her narratives have a distinct simplicity, intensity, and

sincerity. Deshpande writes with a complete awareness that gender is a significant

factor in human life. She considers the writing of ‘The Intrusion’ as a turning point in

her career as a writer, for it was from this story, she admits, she began to speak in her

own voice. It was from then on that she emerged as a ‘woman writer’ who wrote as a

woman about women. Although she is not comfortable with the “ghettoisation” of

female writers into the category of ‘women writers’, she introspects that it is this

discriminatory and separatist attitude of the human society against women that makes

her writing ‘women’s writing’. “My writing,” she reveals, “comes out of my

consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the

idea that society has of me as a woman.” Defining herself as a novelist and short story

writer beyond any other identity – an Indian, a woman, a feminist, an urbanite, or of

third world – she considers “all good writing is socially committed writing, it comes

out of a concern for the human predicament.” It is the writer’s “values of creation and

the values of humanity” that matter and not her class, caste, colour, gender or race

(1996, 103-10).
 72

Shashi Deshpande presently lives in Bangalore with her husband, and

continues to write fiction.

Writing: A Journey towards Self-discovery

It has been variously argued by several literary theorists and writers that

‘writing is a political act’. In patriarchal societies, for a woman to write is an act of

subverting the establishment. To take up the pen and write one’s view point, one’s

innermost thoughts and feelings is deemed as the vital contravention of all kinds of

constriction. This explains why the most fundamental censorship for women, from

centuries onwards, has been the denial of their right to read and write. To keep

women unequipped for expression is a lingering agenda of all patriarchal societies.

Most of the written accounts of women about their life, when they began to write, are

found to be their struggle to get educated and the hurdles they had to overcome in

their path. They constantly speak of desire, fright, secrecy, inhibition, and insurgence

which recur like leitmotifs in their writings.

To women, writing is an act of rediscovering the world, of knowing oneself.

They interpret the world they live in, and create an alternative world seen from the

woman’s point of view. This does not say that all women who write are feminists. In

fact, only a very few of them are social activists trying to bring about change in the

way woman is seen and understood. Albeit, women’s writing did bring about change

in the way literature was written, in the content and style, in language and theme.

‘Literature’ which was for too long a time, a male bastion, after the 1970s began to

see the uninhibited use of terms and metaphors from the kitchen, the labour room,

child birth, about menstruation, about the harem and about everything that women

engaged themselves in and was part of their being. This kind of an alternative writing
 73

“marched into the sacred spaces of literature, making for a revolution that drew its

strength from that other force for progressive social change – feminism” (Joseph

2003, 5). In reality, women have come a long way from being the subject-matter of

writing to being subjects of writing and the writing subject. Of late, every part of the

globe has women who have taken up writing as a rightful, creative expression. They

have brought about change in the conditions in which they write and in which they are

read and written about. For several decades, even now with the exception to those

writers who have come to be regarded as ‘serious writers’, women’s writing had been

scoffed as mere ‘kitchen literature’ filled with personal and insignificant matter sans

vitality and profundity.

Gilbert and Gubar discuss the implications of being a woman writer in cultures

whose basic notions of “literary authority” are “both overtly and covertly patriarchal”

(1991, 289). The duo elucidate what they call “the psychology of literary history,”

that is, the psychological implications of the literary past on a writer. They put forth

the argument of some literary theorists that writers suffer “tensions and anxieties,

hostilities and inadequacies…when they confront not only the achievements of their

predecessors but the traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that they inherit from

their ‘forefathers’” (1991, 290). The first ever student, Gilbert and Gubar mention,

who studied such “literary psycho-history” was Harold Bloom who postulated that a

writer experiences “anxiety of influence” as the works of his predecessors remind him

of the unoriginality of his creation. Gilbert and Gubar call this postulation “intensely

(even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal” for it is only a male literary

tradition that exists in most cultures and it can create an “anxiety of influence” on

male writers and on female writers differently, not in the same way. The woman

writer is dazed between the imposing male precursor and the apathetically different
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way in which he defines the identity of a writer into which she cannot fit. As a result,

Gilbert and Gubar posit, the woman writer faces a far more “radical fear” than

“anxiety of influence” in experiencing “anxiety of authorship” – “…that she cannot

create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate

or destroy her” (1991, 291). Thus, the transformation from being the subject matter of

writing to becoming the writers themselves has been a traumatic one for women

writers as they were ‘swimming against the tide’ and with nothing to hold on to. The

space that contemporary women writers enjoy in the now established “creative female

subculture” is the result of “their eighteenth and nineteenth-century foremothers

(who) struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness,

obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was

endemic to their literary subculture” (1991, 293). The present literary scene then, is

the result of the long battle that women writers of yore fought with patriarchal

tradition and with the conflicts in their own inner selves. This does not suggest that all

is well for a woman writer who writes through the twenty first century. One

unfortunate aspect of human societies is that they change very slowly and too little.

There are several forms of external and internal censorship that wield their power on

the woman’s pen even to this day.

Some of the most enduring questions that have haunted writers, critics and

theorists alike are what connects women to writing; why do they write despite the not

so inclusive attitude of societies that even today categorize literary works by women

as “women’s literature” and not as “literature”? Why is it that the gender of the one

who is saying almost always overpowers what is being said when the speaker is

woman? These questions do not anticipate complete and persuasive answers but

undeniably stimulate a probe into the dynamics of literary creation – different as it is

for female and male writers.

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‘Why do women write?’ is the first and the most radical question that a

woman writer confronts. Writers answer this question in diverse ways which speak of

the psychological distress and subjugation the woman’s mind and body are subjected

to. For most writers writing is the only means of survival in a hostile environment; the

only way to break the silence of word and thought; only outlet for their revenge,

anger, fear; only vent to loneliness and alienation.

As in other countries, especially western, in India too, the women’s movement

played a major role in recovering women’s writing, in cracking the silence that sealed

and stifled their experiences. Women writers in India today have carved a significant

niche for themselves that is beyond dismissal or neglect. They are more ‘visible’

today with the productive support of women’s presses, critics, teachers and activists

who share their concerns and work towards sensitizing the general public.

Nevertheless, they still “encounter all manner of obstacles in expressing themselves

freely, and experience many forms of direct censorship simply because they are

women” (Abraham 1-2). Apart from this, there are also indirect and invisible

pressures that keep lurking all the time bogging down the spirits of a writer, a ‘woman

writer’. It is, however, heartening to discover that women never let their voices to be

hushed up by the patriarchal norms although their expression was clearly defined by

those norms. The background and the mindset with which women set out to write are

extremely interesting, and many times stirring.

In India, women never seemed to have taken up writing with the desire to

attain fame or recognition. In most cases, the urge to write, to express, remained

dormant and groping for several initial years of their life; but found direction

gradually. For many the cause for their inclination towards writing was loneliness and
 76

alienation. They were without companions to share their thoughts or feelings. Some of

them were the first to be educated in their families, and with a lot of struggle with

family and community to achieve it. They persistently suffered the weight of both

blatant and clandestine restrictions clamped on them that left them crippled, curtailed

and wingless. The emotional turbulence and the physical and mental anguish they

endured as a result of such restrictions, they found, were stifling and sickening.

Unable to find concrete ways to protest and fight the confines around them, unable to

contain the surging thoughts of insurgency and counter action, many women writers

claim to have chosen the pen as a weapon for survival, as a mark of defiance. Some

women arbiters from Muslim families who “silently suffered the restrictions,

limitations and darkness into which girls were thrust, and the social evils that

oppressed them…began to write to expose these evils” (Volga 33).

Indian women writers generally focus on personal experiences through which

they talk about gender oppression within their community, about the dynamics of

man-woman relationship in family and in society at large. This inclination of women

writers towards the domestic and the personal is often the source of criticism against

them and their work. But most of the writers feel that they should and can write only

about experiences that have touched them personally in a direct or indirect manner.

This, they feel, should explain why their writing is largely on domestic themes.

Moreover, women writers in India are cognizant of the fact that the ‘domestic’ and the

‘personal’ are no more innocent and simplistic in their import but are comments and

treatises on society. Consciously or unconsciously, most of the writings of women

after the 1970s in India have drawn their concerns from feminism which is a

“postmodern worldview…fundamentally pluralistic rather than holistic and self-

contained, embracing differing and often conflicting positions” (Felski 13).

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Discussing the newer purports of feminist literature, Felski shows how the

advanced contemporary literary theories, chiefly poststructuralist theories, argue that

the principal concerns of feminist critics – the representation of women in literature

and the gender of the writing subject – now seem antiquated and naïve. Felski,

therefore, postulates that feminist literature needs to be understood by expanding

feminism from the personal to the social, to see it as part of social movement aiming, “no

matter on what grounds and by what means, to end the subordination of women” (13).

The earlier feminist assumptions that literature is a “form of self-expression” and “a

reflection of individual experience,” according to Felski, are “discarded”. The recent

feminist literary theory, she says, focuses on “a critical negation of existing codes of

representation and the search for alternative forms” (30).

In practice, women writers in India face problems even now, in handling

subjects like religion and sex, and sometimes politics as well, as they feel that these,

more than any other subject, dispute the conservative man-woman relationship. This

results in “self-censorship,” a serious “form of gender-based censorship, the roots of

which are most often embedded in women’s desire to avoid conflict and refrain from

hurting others” (Joseph 2001, 94). Thus, as Vidya, a Marathi writer says, “Our first

censorship is of ourselves…we censor our thoughts even before writing them down

because of what our families, friends, society might think” (Salvi 62). Calling

‘Feminism’ “a view of the world, an honest sense of the wrong, a voice for human

experience, an insight…and not just a doctrine or a philosophy,” (209) Evelyn Conlon

says that as a woman, and as a feminist, her view will invariably be feminist as she

would not be interested about the life of a man. “I look for the unseen woman in the

kitchen who is keeping him ticking over, serving him, and losing her life for him,”

(209) Conlon writes. However, she is conscious that such writing will not be popular
 78

in the literary world which has been a male preserve. Moreover, her views may hurt

people around her, even the closest ones. This amounts to an inexplicable stress in the

woman who is also a writer as “we have been conditioned not to hurt, never to kill, to

nurture, to care, but we cannot pretend that we have not seen the truth”, the existential

reality of women’s lives (Conlon 209). It does not mean, she clarifies, that women

writers are always afraid to write their true experience and their real insight. She aims

to draw attention to the social and psychological pressures that influence the craft of a

woman writer. If there are specific ambiguities, contradictions, gaps, and unexplored

areas within a literary work, they are indicators to the various forms of censorship

women writers have to negotiate with. Moira Montieth writes in her essay on how

women’s writing is a challenge to theory,

The secrecy, the privacy of writing may be more impersonal, more

public, and more widely interpretable than it is normally considered to

be. Women may find it particularly difficult to bring such connections

to light since self-censorship is a peculiarly strong pressure on them,

controlled as they often are by family conventions about ‘outside’

behavior (7).

The predictable definition of censorship considers it as originating from

governments, nation states or religious fundamentalists; but in reality ‘censorship’ is a

lot more sinister and omnipresent when it functions with regard to women’s writing.

Women’s WORLD, an international network of feminist writers that tackles issues of

gender-based censorship, demands a more applicable definition of censorship based

on a more fundamental assessment of the conditions in which women writers venture

into the art and task of writing and publishing and of the way they are read and

written about. In an attempt to widen its meaning, Women’s WORLD has come up

with a definition of censorship as

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…any means by which ideas and works of art that express views not in

accord with the dominant ideology, are prevented from reaching their

intended audience. Such works may be seized or banned; they may be

ignored, defamed, diminished or purposely misinterpreted in order to

silence their authors and maintain the existing order (Joseph 2003, 7).

Apparently, such explicit forms of censorship have been fading away owing to

the crusade waged by feminist theorists, critics and writers, both female and male,

against gender-based censoring of literary works. However, writers experience other

implicit ways of silencing them which are too subtle sometimes to even reckon with

or fight against.

Discussions on censorship invariably lead one to the cherished concepts of

‘freedom’ and ‘expression’ in human societies. The ideal of freedom, which is

directly linked with the expression of opinion and thought, takes us to the more

indispensable questions. Do women have the freedom to equip themselves to form

opinions and thoughts? How can women emerge as writers when they have no access

to literary education, or the freedom to think independently? If by their sheer effort

and grit, some women do evolve as writers, don’t they find that notions of both

writing and freedom are gendered in the patriarchal societies?

These questions are significant because as Stephen Leacock formulates in his

essay, ‘The Desire to Write,’ writing is primarily an act of thinking. Thinking,

although not the only requirement, Leacock argues, is an essential prerequisite for

writing. If one has the freedom and the ability to think, then one may feel the need or

the urge to say what one thinks; and then one has to use language effectively and

adequately to convey one’s thoughts. Generally, all people, including women, think
 80

but can all people write? Moreover, women’s manner and ability of thinking is to a

large extent conditioned by various taboos and norms pervading family, society, and

in the context pertinent to this discussion, literature too.

Writing is commonly considered to be the result of spontaneous originality,

conscious effort and sincerity to the written word. Leacock dismisses the concept of

spontaneity as a myth by disagreeing with the claims of poets and orators that they are

at their best on the spur of the moment. Leacock posits that “the truth is otherwise.

The bird (so does the poet) spends its life in practice: the orator has agonized at

home” (12). He believes that writers cannot reach far without a considerable amount

of conscious effort, of conscientious quest of an idea. While originality, like thinking,

is essential to writing, writers need the time and leisure to pursue thought before

putting pen on paper. Sincerity, which Leacock considers as the spirit of literature, is

not precisely honesty but a straight association, a kind of unavoidable association

between the words used and the things narrated, between the signifier and the

signified.

With regard to women’s writing in India, several writers have confessed their

inability to ponder over a thought which could enable them to write due to lack of

time, not merely in terms of hours, but rather in terms of its quality. The recorded

interactions with many women writers of various languages in India including

English, published by Women’s WORLD as The Guarded Tongue: Women’s Writing

and Censorship in India (2001), reveal glaring facts about women writers facing

inadequacy of time and space required for creative writing. Some writers have

regretfully recounted their inability to even write a short story and thereby

compromising with shorter essays and humorous pieces. Compared to the luxuries of
 81

time and space that male writers enjoy when they take off from work or move away

from the family to a different or distant place to complete an unfinished book, women

writers submit to the lack of happy, healthy, relaxed writing atmosphere. Sugatha

Kumari, a renowned poet in Malayalam and a social activist, who was also appointed

Chairperson of the State Commission for Women, concedes that dearth of time and

space is a grave constraint for women. She is quoted in The Guarded Tongue as

acknowledging that “In the midst of all our preoccupations about what to cook and

how to look after the children, it is only natural that we find it difficult to concentrate

on our writing…” (Joseph 2001, 108). Most of the women writers seem to write either

early in the morning or late at night for those are the only time when the household is

still and everybody is asleep. Although this could be so with men writers too, they are

hardly constrained by chores like cooking and cleaning, ensuring that the young, the

aged and sick are fed and taken care of. Vaidehi has also said that as a young mother

and as a daughter-in-law of a large family, she used to wake up in the middle of nights

to pen down the thoughts that haunted her through the day. Shashi Deshpande says,

she began her career in writing in her thirties, and with short stories due to lack of

time needed for the larger canvas of novel, owing to her small kids.

Most women writers put family and life over literature and writing as a

personal choice. However, they agree in unison that “family responsibilities,

especially childcare duties, obviously limited the amount of time as well as the

physical, mental and emotional space available to them for writing” (Abraham 176).

Evelyn Conlon writes in her ‘Broadening Visions’, “It is not just the time which is not

there in the first place (after washing, feeding, drying, putting to sleep, waking,

nurturing, scolding…) – the quality of time is never there…. Put on top of that the

frustration of not having time, time, time to do what she must (want to and can) do
 82

and you have a recipe for endless depression” (211). It has thus been a common

experience of most of the women writers across the world to struggle to negotiate

within the spin of domesticity which is exclusive to writers who are also women and

cannot but obstruct their flow of creativity. Very few are able to write everyday, and

almost none can write without breaks.

Apart from the lack of this basic requirement of adequate time and space to

engage themselves in the conscious pursuit of writing, women writers have often seen

a disconnection between what they want to say and what they have actually said.

‘Sincerity’ in this sense, is not becoming possible due to the necessity for secrecy in

what women as writing subjects want to indeed say. The choice of language and style,

therefore, at times is a form of concealment or a means of attaining critical distance,

or both. The need for secrecy or to camouflage their true opinions and responses

arises due to myriad forms of silencing them that permeate women’s existence. The

silencing of woman’s voice or limiting the maximum chord it can reach up to, has

many deeply embedded presumptions about woman and her role and identity in

society. The general “reluctance to recognize women’s subordination as systemic in

nature, therefore denying its political content and seriousness” on the one hand, and

on the other, “the perception, deeply ingrained, of society as divided into public and

private arenas and the implicit assumption that the private is inferior to, and isolated

from, the public” (Joseph 2003, 10) are hardened notions that only perpetuate and

undervalue the repression of women.

The act of writing by women, is a claim to seek an identity in public space as

against only the private space accorded to them, and therefore is a noncompliant act

that has to be silenced, snubbed, ignored, and excluded from the pages of history. A
 83

woman writer is compelled to find ways to overcome or sometimes confront this by

complying with accepted norms, deal with ‘acceptable’ subjects, and employ a

language that is ‘safe and innocuous’.

The family, community, religion, and politics along with class and caste, play

a dominant role in imposing various crippling censors on women’s expression and

prevents them from “telling it straight”, to use Shashi Deshpande’s words. If the

family is the primary source of gender-based censorship, literary establishments play

the successive role. To classify literature into ‘literature’ in general (not as men’s

literature) and ‘women’s literature’ is in itself a serious form of censorship taking

shape from the social belief as Rukmini Bhaya Nair is quoted as saying,

A woman is a thing apart

She is bracketed off, a

Comma, semicolon, at most

A Lower case letter, lost

In the literate circus…. (Joseph 2003, 15)

Women writers have time and again spoken about the need “to forge a new

idiom to make up for the inadequacies and alienating characteristics of the currently

available ‘masculinist’ language, especially for writing on sex, sexuality and sexual

violence.” (Joseph 2003, 30) Writers have often used metaphors and other imagery as

a strategy to conceal what they must say but are unable to say straight.

Women writers face the problem not only of how to say but also of whom to

say. They are seldom read by critics and fellow writers and are scarcely discussed in

public. This leads to the illusion that women write only for women and are

appreciated only by them. Shashi Deshpande says about “marking out” a writer as a
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‘woman writer’, that although she writes about the conflicting ideas about how

woman is perceived in society and her own ides about herself as a human being, it is

ironic that “women’s problems, ideas and lives” are bracketed as ‘women’s problems’

and are not considered as human ones (Deshpande 1996, 107).

Several writers, including Cora Kaplan who says, she “always enjoyed the

sound of (her) own voice” (219), admit that women begin to write with the notion that

all serious writing is done by men and is about the lives of men. She recollects the

beginning of her journey in writing when she thought “to write was to do what my

father did and my mother valued” (220). She admits that she took a long time to find

her own voice and a genre of writing. Once she found her voice, she says, writing has

been an activity with which she likes to be associated. “‘Writer’ ranks way above

‘mother’, ‘teacher’, ‘speaker’, as a vocational identity…” according to Kaplan.

Vaidehi’s opinion too endorses the same when she says, “What a long journey it has

been just to hear one’s own voice! I may have traveled long to get to the source of this

voice…but the quest has been as good as the quest for the knowledge of the whole

universe” (Tharu and Lalita 533).

Women’s Writing – a Tightrope Walk: Chugtai, Vaidehi and Deshpande, and

the genre of ‘short story’

In the ultimate analysis, in a milieu where both inner and outer demands

adversely collide in the lives of women writers in a more intricate and severe manner

than they do on the male writers, for women, to write is a perpetual tightrope-walk.

Hence, to write what they are waiting to communicate, women writers have to choose

a form which gets social sanction, is publishable and can be used to convey

effectively what they want to. The available time and space to write also dictates the
 85

genre women choose to write. Very few women, even when they want to write, when

they know they need to write, are able to sit at length and let their thoughts flow

without interruption.

This interrupted nature of women’s lives often makes for ruptured

writing…. So writers move from modifying the content of their work

to modifying its form…. Epics are replaced by novels; novels are

placed on the back-burner and they settle for short stories instead; short

stories are frequently abbreviated into columns…there are few

magnum opus in women’s writing (Joseph 2003, 22).

Nevertheless, lack of time and space is not the only compelling reason for

women writers to engage in short story writing. In fact, many men writers too have

seriously explored its possibilities. Lauding the speciality of the form, Valerie Shaw

calls the short story “a highly self-conscious form” that is “instinctual” and that brings

“the character to full consciousness for the first time in his (her) life” (2). As Kalpana. H.

feels, women, who are generally considered to be ‘sensitive’ and ‘instinctive’ when

compared to men, can better relate to the form of short story which is intense and

focused. She believes that women writers “are able to portray the predicaments/

oppressions/ injustices/ joys of women with intensity and with a comprehensiveness

that allows them to use the form inwards, and depict the feelings and the emotions of

the inner body and mind” (100).

Narrating stories about even the smallest incidents and the minutest feelings

of human life has been an age old tradition in all the cultures of the world. It is indeed

a difficult task, as Tania Mehta expresses, to trace “the genesis of the story, in any

culture or in the history of any literature…” (151). In modern India, however, the
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advent of education for girls, the revolution in printing and the sudden increase of

journals in the public sphere in every language encouraged more women to connect

themselves with the reading world through the written word. Tracing the rise and

growth of the numerous popular journals, specially intended for women and edited by

both men and women, feminist historian Uma Chakravarti notes the significant role

they played “for women’s writing to reach an ever-widening readership.” Since longer

works like novels needed to be serialized and readers had to wait for periodical

installment of the story, the short story genre gained popularity since readers could

relish the narrative to its finish in one read without having to wait for installments

(Chakravarti xii-vii).

As Sukrita Paul Kumar has rightly observed, the modern age is not contented

with ‘knowing’ the world as it is presented, but is concerned about comprehending

and interpreting the ‘real’ world which “may strip human existence of its

‘phoniness’.” By ripping apart all the “smoky rings of security” and “heavy finery”

and by confronting the ‘real’ experience, the self can emerge with “individual

perception or individual vision” (35). Facilitating such inward journey to understand

the inner and the outer complexities, the short story has been found to be a potential

medium to explore and explicate the veiled nooks and crannies of the human,

particularly of woman’s psyche.

In his insightful essay on Urdu literature in late colonial India, Aamir Mufti

suggests some new ways of reading Urdu literature in the backdrop of a couple of

decades before partition and the “canonical forms of Indian nationalism” (6). He

draws our attention to a paradox where on the one hand the national politics was

ridden with communal extremisms and on the other, Urdu literature of the time
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flourished on the most secular lines. All the renowned Urdu writers of the period –

Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, Miraji, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and others – rather

addressed the ‘national’ audience than ‘muslim’. This paradoxical stance of Urdu

during the 1930s and 1940s, Mufti comments,

is further complicated by the fact that this is also the period that sees

the near disappearance of the national form (supposedly) par

excellence, namely, the novel. This is a period that sees the appearance

instead, of a new and self-confident short-story in the work of a whole

new generation of writers. Urdu is in fact, unique among the major

literatures of South Asia in the emphasis it places on the short-story as

the primary genre of narrative fiction, even over the decades after

partition (8).

Mehr Afsan Farooqi, in her study of Modern Urdu literature, has also

remarked that “the twentieth century has been the most exciting time” in the

comparatively brief history of Urdu’s literary production as the period saw the advent

of the short story and the revolutionary ideas in literature circulated by the “new and

disquieting elements like the Progressive Writers’ Movement…” (xxi-ii). With a

history of not more than a hundred odd years, the Urdu ‘mukhtasar afsana’ (short

story) or ‘kahani’ came under amazing transformation and rose up to become the

most popular and experimentative of all the genres in just a span of fifty years. Early

Urdu short story writers were heavily influenced by writers like Maupassant and

Chekov. Both of these writers, especially Chekov, paved the way to realistic narration

involving “introspective subjectivity”, says Farooqi. The Progressive Writers’

Association (PWA) headed by one of Hindi’s earliest and most successful short story

writers, Premchand, brought out a collection of short stories titled ‘Angare’(Embers)

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which transfigured the literary scene in Urdu through its bold tone and realistic

content. “The writers of the ‘Angare’ group,” Farooqi comments, “were passionate

advocates of what they described as socially engaged literature. Their primary

concern was not with form, style, or language, but with ‘socially relevant subjects’”

(xxxi).

Ismat Chugtai was one of the outstanding among a host of brilliant fiction

writers of PWA. She was a staunch Progressive handling several ‘forbidden’ themes

that raked up much controversy in the 1930s. She was adept at utilizing the short story

“to seek and define connections between culture and female experience, especially in

the middle-class Muslim societies…” (Naqvi 2006, x). Chugtai uses her narratives as

the means to expose the socio-cultural discrepancies and the psychosexual

determinants that govern the evolution of female consciousness.

There are examples in Urdu fiction of several male writers like Mirza Ruswa

(Umrao Jan Ada), Hasan Shah (Nashtat) and women writers like Walida Afzal Ali

(Goodar Ka Lal) and Hijab Imtiaz Ali having taken up the different aspects of

women’s lives in their writing. But none of them “challenged the mores and values of

(his) her time and fiercely advocated selfhood and self-definition for women”, like

Chugtai. (Asaduddin xi) Chugtai wrote short stories, essays, sketches, plays, novels,

film scripts, and travelogues but her most noteworthy accomplishment is in the short

story form.

In his description of the ‘Short Story’, M. H. Abrams discusses “story of

incident” and “story of character” of which the former focuses on “the course and

outcome of the events” while the latter rests impetus on “the state of mind and

motivation, or on the psychological and moral qualities of the protagonists” (194).

 89

Chugtai’s characters which are mostly stories of character have incidents or events on

the periphery highlighting, dramatizing a single human situation and a single

protagonist or at the most, two or three characters. In her hands, the short story

becomes a miniature canvas where intricate interplay of society and culture on the

psyche of her characters is depicted with bold and distinct strokes. Although male

characters do appear in her narratives her primary concern is to deal with the

problems and conflicts of women. Therefore, the male characters in Chugtai are sheer

catalysts to illumine the invisible and proscribed aspects of women’s lives. Her

characters are not self-directed individuals but are products of a certain social

environment that sculpt their psyche and behaviour.

With the Progressive Writers’ Movement infusing a new wave of thinking in

the Hindi heartland, the short story became a weapon to fight out obsolete ideologies

and usher new and egalitarian ones. ‘Short story’ graduated from a mere artistic

narration of events into a critique of society and a tool to delve deep into individual

minds. In Urdu, especially, Mehta remarks, the short story breaks through beneath the

ostensible reality as it attempts to contend with existential and psychological

dimensions of human existence. This is all the more true with regard to uninhibited

writers like Ismat Chugtai who honed the art of storytelling to ‘lift the veil’ over the

ignominious existence of the women around her. Chugtai has skillfully dealt with

female sexuality, reckoning with the sexual impulses of women and has boldly

portrayed their sexual identity almost a decade before Simone de Beauvoir discussed

it in The Second Sex (1949). A hitherto ‘forbidden’ subject in Urdu literature, and in

Indian literature in general, “female sexuality could not come out in the open so

easily, it had to break open only through a jerk in the form of short story” says

Mehta (156). In the hands of sensitive and gutsy writers like Chugtai, the short story
 90

aims not only to cause a far-reaching change or revolution in the ways woman is

perceived, but to record the fractured, incoherent, discordant and disregarded

existential realities of women which are the consequence of, but are completely

overlooked by, political, social, and literary history.

In Kannada too, the short story has been popular among women writers from

the dawn of the twentieth century. Sandhya Reddy, who surveys the features of

Kannada women’s literature, and in particular, of the Kannada short stories by women

after the 1970s, says it is intriguing that just as women writers were attracted towards

the form, ‘woman’ became the subject of the short story. She relates it to the probability

that each woman is a repertoire of stories of her own self and of others. She considers it

amazing how every woman’s life is an untold story. Life becomes a story, she explains,

when it has several unexpected turning points. A woman’s life, in this sense, is a story

for sure because right from entering into the stage of puberty, to marriage, to entering

into the alien domain called the marital home, to living with a stranger who ‘has to

be’ accepted as husband, to giving birth to children, or to be unable to do that, to

sometimes lose the husband, to be compelled to shuttle between the ‘natal home’ and

the ‘marital home’, to leading a life of dependence -- every event, every stage in her

life keeps displacing her, making her life an unending story (392).

Vaidehi changed the contours of short story in Kannada by experimenting on

traditional themes like the rural life, family life, the complexities of woman-man

relationships and the changes brought about by modern life. As she says in one of her

interviews:
 91

Perhaps it (writing short stories) was because I loved the narrative

style. So many people visited our house and spoke to my mother about

different kinds of incidents…. There was an uninterrupted narrative

process going on around me, the inner courtyard of my house was full

of stories…. The story became an effective medium through which I

felt I could try to understand human beings. To me the storyline is

never as important as what I look for using the story as a means (2004,

204).

Vaidehi’s predecessors like Triveni, Anupama Niranjana, Neeladevi and

several other writers of fiction too unraveled the subtle complexities of women’s

lives. Nonetheless, Vaidehi who began writing from the 1970s, emerged as a distinct

voice from the rest with her narratives reading like psycho-biographies of women

whose very existence and experience were nullified in the annals of social history.

Unlike the writers before her and some of her contemporaries, Vaidehi does not use

her writing as an instrument to bring about change in society. In her own words, she

began to write “in order to discover the truth of the struggles I had both witnessed and

experienced. In the process of writing I realized that all our struggles were human,

related to human relationships, and beyond gender” (2004, 209). This aim of short

story writing coincides with Tania Mehta’s assessment of the possibility in the form

of short story which she opines, “can express the most difficult, paradoxical,

unparaphrasable truths of life as it is actually lived. It is through stories that we have a

variety of human perceptions about our world and reality” (152).

Vaidehi has been acclaimed for using the genre efficiently in terms of

employing the nuances of Kannada language, the art and techniques of narration, the

wry humour, the sensitive insight into ostensibly simple lives and the sociological
 92

approach that pervade her short fiction. She is revered as “a sustained story teller with

a penchant for uncovering the hidden agenda of patriarchy…beneath her tales is a

vision of the mundane and ordinary” (Subbarao 2008). In her introduction to Five

Novellas by Women Writers, Uma Chakravarti makes a similar comment in

connection with the novellas in the collection, which includes Vaidehi’s Jatre (The

Temple Fair). This comment applies to Vaidehi’s short stories as well:

What is notable about all the novellas is that none of them has a central

plot which moves inexorably to a closure, or even a moment of

dramatic intensity; they are instead like the everyday lives of women,

quite intensely female in experience… (xxi).

Vaidehi began to write in the 1970s when Feminism in Europe had reached its

pinnacle transforming astoundingly, the literary and cultural ambiences in different

parts of the world. Nevertheless, Vaidehi remained largely unaware of the changes

occurring due to the feminist wave lashing over the hegemonic systems of society and

polity. She was far off from ideology and politics but was emerging as a natural

crusader, a conscientious rebel against the suppression of womanhood within the

oppressive overriding text of patriarchy. Her tales draw neither from a conscious

philosophical and ideological frame of the feminism of the West, nor from the

mythical and legendary past of the East. Her texts are typically contemporary both in

spirit and time. Interrogating patriarchy from within the snippets of tradition, she

takes a sensitively mutinous standpoint to negotiate a space for women, through her

stories, amidst an ever suspending discourse of male hegemony.

Vaidehi uses ‘the short story’ as a means to expound intangible and

imperceptible spaces in women’s texts, their lives. The ‘Indian Story’, which is an
 93

expedient label to foreground the assorted facets of storytelling or narratology, in fact,

serves to represent the huge sub-continent which is full of sub-cultures, groups,

languages, dialects and religions. A precious cistern of Indian short stories across

diverse languages and various cultures are waiting to be heard and disclosed and

experienced.

A study of Chugtai in Urdu and of Vaidehi in Kannada can exemplify the

treasures, both in terms of the art and the experience, that lie veiled and bound in

India’s linguistic zones. These stories also stand testimony to the superiority of

exploration into the inner space as an extension and consequence of the outer,

undertaken by these eminent and path breaking writers of two rich languages of India.

Tania Mehta’s study of the Indian short story reveals that, “there is so much

variety and heterogeneity in Indian short story that it does not fall into any exclusive

category.” The Indian short story, as Mehta identifies, has three dimensions – desi,

margi and videshi. While the ‘desi’ refers to the “little (folk) traditions … (with)

specific narratology, structural topology and sociology… (Pre-dating) Sanskrit

literature…,” the ‘margi’ is the “assimilationist paradigm” between “the local and the

national”. On the other hand, its ‘videshi’ dimension “implies essentially colonial,

which historically speaking is now a part of our collective unconscious.” (Mehta 153-54)

The Modern Indian short story is thus, a blend of the desi, margi and videshi features

of the art of narration. In the Indian languages, the short story genre has been

successfully employed by both male and female writers to re-invent and re-present

social and personal history.

In the case of Shashi Deshpande, who is recognized as an Indian English

novelist, the short story becomes a spring board for her to dive into writing after being
 94

“stifled” for thirty initial years of her life. As she narrates in an interview, in the early

years she was just bursting with ideas which all came out in the form of stories when

she began to put pen on paper. Deshpande recollects that when she began writing in

the 1970s, there were many short story writers in English. She attributes this to the

various avenues of publication available for the short story in those times. Her own

stories found easy acceptance in ‘Femina’, ‘Eve’s Weekly’, ‘Illustrated Weekly of

India’, ‘Deccan Herald’, ‘Mirror’ and many such magazines and journals. In the

initial days of her writing career, she faced “something all women know and

understand - the time constraint. With two small children and a home to care for, I

could have never dreamt of the luxury of having a long stretch of time to work in,”

reminisces Deshpande (2003, xvii). Along with this, easy access to publication and

the flock of people vying in her mind to narrate their stories led Deshpande to think

that the short story genre suited her best. However, gradually, she felt that when the

space that was once devoted to short stories in the pages of magazines and the Sunday

papers began to be occupied by “political events and accounts of celebrities,” short

story writers in English began to dwindle. This, besides her wish to travel with her

characters for a longer time and to know them better, was “one of the reasons why

(she) stopped writing stories, except when (she) was commissioned.”

Deshpande shot into limelight with her shorter fiction in 1977. She confesses

in ‘The Dilemma of the Woman Writer’ that she “started writing first; the thinking

about it came much later” (229). However, this does not apparently apply to her

choice of the short story genre in the early days of her writing career. A.N. Dwivedi

argues in his essay on Deshpande’s shorter fiction that she is not among those writers

who have taken up short-story writing as a means to be relieved from “the ‘ennui’ and

boredom of a tense and restive time. She is instead one of those who have taken to
 95

this form seriously and with bonafide intentions” (176). Evidently, Deshpande’s short

stories are in many ways, like themes and technique, similar to her larger fiction in

spite of the fact, as Lakshmi Holmstrom puts forth in her introduction to The Inner

Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women (1990), that “the short story seems to impose

certain conditions: intensity, concentration, suggestiveness, surprise.” However,

Holmstrom quickly adds, “it also allows a variety of approaches…” (ix).

In Indian English writing too, just as in other Indian languages, the literary

form of the short story is a rather recent phenomenon, mostly of the 20th century.

Nevertheless, it rapidly gained roots and flourished in India owing to the

establishment of abundant number of journals and magazines in English along with

the other Indian languages available in the 1920s and thereafter. These journals

thrived on different readers. Some of them were obscure, some popular, and a few

exclusively for women. This period witnessed the first-wave of feminist writing

corresponding with the development of women’s movement in India, with the newly

educated women who took up writing adding different dimensions and themes to

literature. Functioning within the early tradition of social reform and social comment,

some of the best women writers of the time, sketched strong and clear portraits of

women of their community. In the process, by the 1930s and 1940s some outstanding

women short story writers (like Chugtai in Urdu) drew the attention of critics and

readers alike.

With the attainment of Independence, the first wave of the women’s

movement came to an end, with some gains and many disappointments. The

traditional discrimination against women in the name of religion, and family

continued giving rise to a second wave of the women’s movement in the seventies. It
 96

raised some radical questions about the existential realities of women vis-à-vis the

promised realities. It was during this period that Deshpande began to write short

stories encouraged by a number of journals and magazines that offered a ready

platform for publication.

Presently into writing novels, Deshpande feels ‘the novel’ has “almost

eclipsed the short-story writer in (her)” (2003, xvii). However, reminiscing about the

origin and source of her stories, she says each one of them “has its associations, each

carries memories of a particular point in my life” (2003, xv). In her definition, “a

short story is often just one situation. One moment of time brilliantly illuminated, a

moment in a relationship put under a microscope. Always a catalytic moment” (2003, xvi).

Short story has been used by many authors to re-write myths, legends and

epics. Deshpande too explores the Indian Puranas and the epics in a few of her stories.

She finds both the female characters and the stories of the past lend themselves to

different interpretations. Old stories, she says, “give you the space to search for your

own meanings; therefore the possibility of rewriting, the re-visioning, the recreating.”

(2004, Introduction) Deshpande is interested not only in reinventing the ancient but in

interpreting and comprehending the present as well. G.S. Amur, in his preface to

Deshpande’s collection of stories called The Legacy and Other Stories (1978)

remarks,

Woman’s struggle, in the context of contemporary Indian society, to

find and preserve her identity as wife, mother and most important of

all, as human being is Shashi Deshpande’s major concern as a creative

writer, and this appears in all her important stories (10).

 97

To Deshpande, however, it does not matter whether her writing is about

yesterday or about today. To her “writing is always about looking for your own

truths” (2004).

In the eventual study, the short stories of Chugtai, Vaidehi and Deshpande call

for careful reading and appreciation through their intensity and multiplicity of voices.

They are engaged in evolving a dialogue with the reader, and with the society at large,

creatively interpreting and confronting the various hegemonies that dictate human

lives, mainly of women of different cultures, classes and religions. They seek to

question certain beliefs and traditions of the Indian society, which is not essentially

different from other societies of the world, about the entity called ‘woman’. They

present the world as it appears to a woman. To label these writers as ‘women writers’,

‘feminist writers’, is to limit their serious concerns about human existence. Their

protagonists, almost all female, prove Paulo Freire’s conviction as elucidated by

Richard Shaull in his foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993) that

every human being, no matter how “ignorant” or submerged in the

“culture of silence” he or she may be, is capable of looking critically at

the world in a dialogical encounter with others. Provided with the

proper tools for such encounter, the individual can gradually perceive

personal and social reality as well as the contradictions in it, become

conscious of his or her own perception, of that reality, and deal

critically with it (14).

The stories of the three writers serve as “an alternate to feminist theory” which

Tania Mehta considers to be a significant feature of short story. She posits that the

short story “spills into areas and directions which even the theory, with its rigour of

argument and counter argument cannot anticipate” (160).

 98

Chugtai, Vaidehi and Deshpande have not only widened the outline of the

short story as a literary form by introducing a refreshingly new spoken language,

particularly the familiar language from the woman’s world, but also have

foregrounded those delicate and indiscernible aspects of women’s lives and

consciousness which were hitherto partially known or absolutely unknown to the

literary world.
 99

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